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As always, thanks Lou for posting this. I want though to comment on this paragraph from Staten's article. He wrote *Neoliberalism does not impose itself on us coercively, via punitive measures or structures of discipline, but gently shapes our common-sense understandings of the world and ourselves through the medium of our everyday experiences, turning us into competitors, entrepreneurs, and round-the-clock workers. We are not exactly subjugated by neoliberalism, as one is subjugated by totalitarianism; instead, we are “subjectified” by it. Rather than its victims, we learn to become its willing participants; and architecture, argues Spencer, becomes one of our key instructors.* I am currently working though Enzo Traverso's Left wing Melancholia and also preparing a piece on the great South East Queensland Electricity Board [a publicly owned entity] dispute in Queensland in the 1985 period when 1002 electricity workers were sacked and their work was outsourced to private contractors. It was one of the incipient moments in the onset of neoliberalism in Australia and it was far from gentle. I myself was arrested five times that year and fined thousands of dollars for solidarity work on picket lines that were made illegal by the government. Others suffered much more, of course Now, a central part of Traverso's argument is that we must see the past not in terms of victim-hood but as the defeat of militancy. The defeats testify to the existence of struggle and we mourn them, but we also try to learn from the defeats. The Staten-Foucault thesis though would deny struggle and agency and therefore the possibility of an alternative outcome. It is as if neoliberalism is piped into the air conditioning system and we all become robotic neoliberals. Rubbish, yes and it does not give any indication how we are now at the stage where neoliberalism is breaking down as a paradigm and we are capable of making a rational judgement that we would be better off with an alternative paradigm. Staten's article reinforces for me personally once again the danger of Foucault-Nietzsche thought with its inherent disdain for the possibility that the lower orders might have agency. comradely Gary On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 8:41 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > > > https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-exists-is-good-on- > the-architecture-of-neoliberalism/ > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt > ions/marxism/gary.maclennan1%40gmail.com > _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
